Banditry

Clive has a good piece up on CiF on the way that internationally, David Cameron is going to be perceived as the UK’s George W Bush, both for his buffoonery and his disdain for international agreements.

Being a CiF thread, the comments spiralled into Europhobic lunacy. However, responding to a silly-ish question there did give me the opportunity to articulate both my support for the EU in principle, and my opposition to an English parliament, more coherently than I’ve managed before:

In practice, some things work better at the level of 500m people, some things work better at the level of 50m people, some better at the level of 5m people, some at the level of 500k people, and so on down the chain.

Hence, there’s a role for the EU, the UK, the UK regions, district councils, and parish councils. At the moment, outside of Wales, NI and Scotland, everything is far too centralised at the second level (which is why an English parliament would be a waste of time - what we need are seven English parliaments, each with the power of the Welsh Assembly at least, representing a manageable number of people), with too little power delegated to regions, districts and parishes.

I’m struggling to see how anyone could sensibly disagree with that. Yes, “the EU is corrupt so we shouldn’t be in it” is a valid argument for all I disagree, but isn’t the claim the UKIP/English Democrat types are making - that the optimal area of government for us happens to correlate directly with the outcomes of a few battles between 1000 and 300 years ago - just utterly insane?

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